I bought some GameStop when it was $10 but chickened out and sold it a few days before it went to like $420 a share cuz I thought I was being baited by wallstreetbetters. I only later found out a close friend of mine who is a generally responsible investor was heavily in that and sold at like $200~ to pay off all his medical debt. He’s not rich either, but financially better off than before that happened.
Back in 1988 I had a school project with a few people, one of whom came from a wealthy family. The project was regarding the stock market, and each team was given a certain amount of imaginary money to invest, to see who would win out at the end of the semester. My friend with the wealthy family came back with a recommendation from his father, of course, and we won the contest easily.
The recommendation? Put all our funds into Berkshire Hathaway.
I had the golden goose egg right in front of me and never invested a dime.
I had a similar school project around the same era. My wealthy grandfather suggested I invest in Phillip Morris. You should have seen the look on my teachers face when I bought the fake stock!. I actually ended up getting extremely into it and sold all of those “evil” fake stocks for an early tech company. I was quite certain it would do well, and I was right and I ended up winning the project by a wide margin. I tried to get my parent to let me use most of my savings account to buy real stock but they dismissed the idea because I was just a kid. It would have paid for my college education entirely if they had let me (they certainly didn’t help).
Didn’t get “rich” per se, but I got in on dogecoin when it was at a penny, missed the peak, and ended up selling in the 30 cent range. I also picked up a ton of oil stocks in March 2020 when it bottomed out that I later sold for more than 15x their original value.
The irony is that I invested in dogecoin because Robbing Hood locked down investments into Gamestop. I didn’t realize that would be such a lucky development at the time.
Those investments paid off my student loans and got me a down payment on a condo. I still have five-figures in my investment account that I’m growing into early retirement. My current focus is gambling stocks, in large part because every election year it seems like there’s a smattering of states legalizing online sports betting. (MO and NE have it on the ballot for this year.)
Idk how well this would actually sell but years ago in my early 20s, I came up with the idea for a beer coozie for 40oz bottles.
40s are great if you are poor and want just enough of a buzz but unless you chug them, they get warm halfway through. Which is also why 12oz cans/bottles are probably also more appealing.
Just a big ass coozie to keep your Bud Ice cold in a Sunday afternoon of porch drinking.
Had about €5 in a prepaid credit card ready to buy bitcoin back when that got you a couple hundred of them. Website didn’t like the prepaid credit card, so I used it to buy something else (Runescape membership I think?).
Also gave up on Bitcoin mining after a few hours because I didn’t see the point back when anyone with a reasonable GPU could mine.
Realistically, I would’ve sold the moment this stuff would’ve become worth about a hundred bucks, but it’s nice to imagine what could’ve been.
One parent had a growing business when I was super young, they brought home well into the 6 figures. However two things happened 1: the internet started getting bigger so that started to hurt their business and 2: the 2008 housing crash happened and for a business that worked with banks on mortgages (I was too young to fully understand what the business did) it was fatal. Then we were dirt poor! The family never really recovered but after many years we did manage to get on our feet, then a parent died and shit went down hill again lmao.
I could’ve grown up a rich kid, instead I grew up with a family oats pot for meals. Though I’m probably a healthier grounded human for it.
There has to be more to the story than that. Your parents probably didn’t disclose to you the other hardships they faced, whether they were self induced or not
My great uncle was a nice dude fucked up from war. It made he introverted and he turned to trucking and the road to make ends meet. It was basically all he ended up doing. He never married or had kids, and stacked up all this cash. Before he died, he had put 1 million in cash in a suitcase, put it in the trunk of a car, and gave it to my grandparents. They couldn’t get the trunk open, didn’t investigate, sold the car.
I had the idea to offload machine learning to GPUs back in the early 00’s. I was working for a company doing number plate recognition back then, so I was even in a position to act on my idea… but my boss thought I was nuts.
I’m not sure how much money I would have made, but it’s got to be better than this!
OK, it was a basic pattern recognition model, nothing nearly as sophisticated as we have now, but I think it would have performed significantly faster.
In 2010 I built a new computer. I was interested in bitcoin from a “this is technically neat” category. I set it up and was able to mine dozens of coins per day.
I did. It was all set up and working. But it generated a lot of heat in my upstairs So. Cal. Apartment. So I stopped. Just deleted the coins because they were pretty worthless then.
I don’t get too upset though because I never would have held them to $50k each. I would have sold them for a buck each.
Around the same time I almost bought around 250$ worth of BTC. I was broke rent was coming up, it would have made my month difficult so I passed. Could have never paid rent/mortgage ever again.
I made six months’ worth of rent off the 2017 surge. I sold in the 18k range, because people’s greed at the time was legit scary. I knew a guy who took out a second mortgage on his house to buy more $18,000-priced BTC.
Same. I bought some 70 bitcoins for 50€ when I first heard of it. Kept mining on a radeon 9770 or something at about 1BTC or 5€ per week. Electricity was included in my rent then, but I stopped because fan noise.
I lost a bunch on mtgox. Cashed out for a down payment on a house way too early (2016). I’d be rich if I had hodled.
My friend told me about Bitcoin when it was about $8 per coin. I was young and making some extra cash from working and not really buying too much stuff so I could have easily tossed down $100 on some crypto and let it ride.
The very next time I even bothered paying attention to crypto was when Bitcoin shot up to 78k from like 60k.
Bitcoin showed up on my radar when they were worth pennies, but I was young and had no way to buy them and didn’t have a computer that could really mine them. Once I had the means to buy, I had no money. By the time I had a little extra money, they were already in the thousands.
Same story with Tesla. They weren’t public when they popped up on my radar, and when they made their IPO I had no money to invest.
I had the same experience with bitcoin. I had friends excitedly talking about it when it was around $1-$2 a coin and I dismissed it as a neat idea that would never fly. When BTC “crashed” at $10, I felt vindicated. Now I feel completely foolish :)